"The growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral rather than a straight line." ~Joanna Field

Sunday, May 29, 2011

More Paper stuff

I got a piece of MDF-like board to make a deckle out of (A whopping 2.09$).

A deckle, for the uninitiated, is basically a mold for the paper pulp to follow (though there is something else called a mold, so it would be confusing to call them both that, ne?)

My mold (a frame with screen stretched over it instead of canvas) is about 11x14" on the inside, meaning that if I pull it straight (with no deckle on top) it give me sheets with a wavily-flurry-soft... uhm... not-straight/smooth edge that are about 11x14". Which is nice, there are a lot of things you can do with an 11x14" sheet of paper. (Folded in quarters it makes a nice size for a notebook sheet)

But sometimes I want something else. Like an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet (Letter) (Or 8 1/4 x 11 3/4" (A4) if you are not Canadian or American. Though I wonder why the International sizing of paper isn't in metric?)

Or, in my case, ENVELOPES. Yeppers, I'm making envelopes. I hope to be selling paper things, and past notebooks and plain paper, envelopes are a good start.

And for that major project I mentioned, I need about 100 of them.

Yup. Count em, 100.

And do you know how tedious it is to cut an envelope by hand?

Very.

That's all you need to know.

So doing 100 of them? No. Nuh-uh. Not happening.

So by using a deckle I can restrict the paper pulp from covering the whole mold, and pull envelopes out of the vat on their own. Yay.

Now if I could couch(lay out) more than 11 sheets at a time, this wouldn't take shy of a week to do.

I'm thinking I'll get two more boards and a bunch more fabrics (and possibly more clamps) so I can at least couch about 20-25 at a time.

I want to try out some textured fabrics, like canvas for drying on.

Add that to wanting to try denim paper, lint paper, plant dying, plant fibre paper, embossing, additives, and more notebook styles, and you've got a lot of things I hope to accomplish.

My main point of pursuit right now is colour. The way I've gotten colour before is by starting with colour papers.

Which is great.

If you have coloured recycling.

And right now I'm lucky to get any recycling that isn't box card or cardboard.

So I have a lot of brown going on.

But this project (which I swear I will go into more later) requires purple.

I've been trying to find ways of dying paper, and it's a hard thing to research for some reason.

Right now it is looking like I am going to be trying out a red cabbage dye.

I hope to find some kind of commercial dye, or at least something more reliable than my plant works.

I've got mum asking on Freecycle for recycling paper so I can at least have a good amount of pulp going.

I also just did a test of "fixing" paper (making it more water fast, so it won't run as much if you use inks on it) by adding a heap of cornstarch to the water. I don't know how much is needed, but it felt simultaneously like a lot and not much at all. (You use so little in most cooking things, but this vat is about 2 1/2' x 3 1/2' x 1 1/4', and half-full. So to make a mark in that much water?